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Nov 25 2013

# London Grip New Poetry – Winter 2013

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This issue of London Grip features new poems by:

*Murray Bodo *Ian House *Louise Warren *David Cooke *Benjamin Smith
*Kerrin P Sharpe *Stephen Claughton *Martyn Crucefix *Sue Rose
*Carol DeVaughn *Stephen Oliver *Merryn Williams
*Sarah Glaz *Brian Docherty * Tatiana Bonch-Osmolovskaya *Graham Burchell
*Nancy Mattson *John Snelling *Vaughan Rapatahana
*Kate Foley *Martin Burke *Robert Nisbet *Fiona Sinclair
*David Flynn *Rowland Bagnall *Gordon Meade *Alan Price *Michael Bartholomew-Biggs

Copyright of all poems remains with the contributors

A printer-friendly version of London Grip New Poetry can be found at LG new poetry Winter 2013-4

Please send submissions for the future issues to poetry@londongrip.co.uk, enclosing no more than three poems and including a brief, 2-3 line, biography

Editor’s Introduction

Our heading picture for this quarter’s posting is a reminder of the late and much-missed Seamus Heaney. Appropriately, themes of remembrance and reflections on mortality feature quite strongly in this issue, beginning with Murray Bodo’s delicate memorial to Seamus Heaney and Herbert Lomas. But there is also a leavening of lighter touch material in a selection of winter poetry that is both varied and generous – so generous in fact that (in contrast to the previous, relatively picture-rich, issue) there has been no room for illustrations to accompany the poems. Indeed, the editorial office was kept so busy simply with the tasks of choosing the best words and then putting them in the right order that there seemed to be no time even to search for complementary images.

As London Grip New Poetry enters its third year we’d like to remind our readers once more that our parent site London Grip contains much more than poetry. It regularly features articles on art and theatre as well as book reviews (still mainly poetry but an increasing amount of prose). In between my three-monthly email alerts about new poetry postings, readers can be kept in touch with other material on the site by becoming a Facebook friend or Twitter follower of London Grip. If these technologies do not appeal, it is also possible to become a “subscriber” and to receive a weekly email notice of the latest additions the London Grip website. To be registered as a subscriber simply send me a request at poetry@londongrip.co.uk – there is of course no charge!

Michael Bartholomew-Biggs

http://mikeb-b.blogspot.com/

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Murray Bodo: A Late Reading of “A Kite for Aibhin”

i.m. Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013

    I’d hoped for years to hear you
    Read, but always missed – too late
    Or wrong day or time – which led

    To a correspondence, books
    I’d send – a stamped envelope
    Enclosed – for your signature.

    And then wheeling the poet
    Herbert Lomas to Snape where
    We found you at last reading

    At “The Maltings” in a pool
    Of light, floating your poems
    Out into the crowded hall

    And we a far shore from you,
    Crippled like those at Siloe
    And no one to lower us

    To where you laid soft, laving
    Anahorish syllables
    On waves that almost reached us.

    Then hearing we couldn’t walk
    To you, you sent Human Chain,
    Songs that remain now you’re gone

    And Lomas, too, here where your
    Voice rises from the page to
    Its pitch, then pauses, and stops:

    The pull of a kite stared at
    Until string breaks and – separate, elate –
    The kite takes off, itself alone, a windfall.

Murray Bodo is a Franciscan Friar. A member of the Franciscan Academy, he divides his time between Assisi, Italy and Cincinnati, Ohio, leading pilgrimages and writing. His latest book of poems, Something Like Jasmine, with accompanying CD of the author reading his poems, was released by Tau Publishing in 2012.

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Ian House: Flight

Amy Johnson, aviatrix, 1903-41

    In puttees, helmet, khaki shorts she strides,
    holding a packet of sandwiches, a Thermos of tea:
    ‘Johnnie’, surrounded by a buzz of chums.

    Struts creak and strain: the plywood frame’s aloft.
    Press barons puff like zephyrs and she’s on her way
    from Maida Vale to Constantinople and Queensland.

    She settles to the bliss of solo hours.

    Amy, the nation’s girl next door,
    is where we want to be,
    above and beyond herself,
    running away from the whole shebang.

Before retirement, Ian House taught in England, Philadelphia and Moscow. His first collection was Cutting the Quick (Two Rivers Press). His second collection, Nothing’s Lost (also Two Rivers Press), is to be published in April 2014. He lives in Reading.

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Louise Warren: Achilles’ Heel

    I had forgotten what it was to jump out of myself
    into a room emptied out of objects, of belongings,

    to feel the air underneath the soles of my feet,
    a child flying out of my adult shoes

    into a game.
    The room was bare and cloudless

    I jumped
    I jumped

    a sharp snap
    and a wing tore open in my heel.

    It flared, I flew, and landed
    shocked as a pilot bailing out of a perfect sky.

    .

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Louise Warren: Bat House

    Sometime, almost dark, the field sliding up into the trees,
    we held up our hands, each with our own sensor.
    It was like holding up a glass to the side of the night,
    waiting to catch the ticks and squeaks,
    the bats flying out of the boarded up house.

    Earlier that day, some kids had tried to get through.
    Pushing down the nettles, but the wires were tightly
    wound around the house, glimmering now in the draining light,
    the light like dead ashes and the dark filling up the woods.
    It was then that we heard him

    the old man shuffling from room to room, the creak
    of his foot on the stair. A clock somewhere,
    the squeak of a door. He muttered under his breath,
    and we caught the odd word, bang, like that, a rough laugh,
    I felt my hand shake, mostly it was a low hiss.

    I dropped my sensor onto the grass.
    The black was filling up the forest, someone cried out,
    look! bats, as something flicked through the air,
    then another, quick as a thought, an electric impulse moving
    along the wires which wound around the house, that flicked out
    as if they'd snapped.

Louise Warren won the Cinnamon Press First Collection Prize and her book A Child’s Last Picture Book of the Zoo was published in 2012. She has also been widely published in magazines and anthologies including Agenda, Envoi, Fuselit, Genius Floored Poetry Anthology, The Interpreters House, The New Writer, Orbis, Obsessed with Pipework, Poetry Wales, The Rialto, Seam and Stand. In 2013 her poems were highly commended for both the Ver and Yeovil Poetry Prize.

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David Cooke: The Home

    Purpose-built for what remains
    of final days – their unaccountable
    tariff of good, bad, indifferent –
    it lies at the end of a block drive,
    power hosed and sealed against
    the encroachment of weeds.

    With its institutional facade
    of Mock Tudor beams
    criss-crossed and dependable,
    it looms up to greet us
    with unflappable cheeriness,
    its brickwork proof

    against the years’ attrition.
    It’s there I see you still, resolute
    and cranky, your good humour
    seeping away, a clouded ichor,
    as nonetheless, falteringly,
    you raise yourself from a chair.

    Gripping a frame that gives
    you backbone, you take small
    steps along the corridor,
    unaware, as you concentrate,
    of the bed bound frailty of others
    whose doors are always ajar.

    Returning to your own,
    you see through the window
    horses in a paddock,
    but then catch, excitedly, a glint
    of foxes which we, too, make out
    just before they vanish.

David Cooke’s poems and reviews have appeared in Agenda, Ambit, The Bow Wow Shop, The Critical Quarterly, The Irish Press, The London Magazine, Magma, The North, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry London, Poetry Salzburg Review, The Reader, The SHOp and Stand. His current collection is Work Horses published by Ward Wood in 2012

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Benjamin Smith:Wet Grass

    You raced across the fields
    Imitating your favourite horse from the stables,
    Your perfume trailing behind you.
    I remember it was called: Wet Grass.
    It soaked me to the bone, it
    Drenches my memories.

    In the morning you used to wake me up,
    Tugging at my hair and then pretending to be asleep.
    Your shivering shoulders always betrayed you.

    You said to me: We’ll be together forever,
    And I believed you.
    I guess you weren’t lying;
    I still see you in my dreams sometimes,
    In fields of wet grass, your skirt gliding, your
    Legs galloping like wild stallions.

    You are always running away from me,
    Pelting to the distance, smiling -
    You always look happy in that moment.

Benjamin Smith is 28 years old and grew up in Hebden Bridge, West Yorkshire. He has spent the past three years travelilng around Latin America and is currently living in Mexico where he is working on a number of poems that draw on the influences of travel. This is his first published poem.

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Kerrin P Sharpe: how to shoot an arrow for a horse

    in the long-legged darkness
    richard grows the vertebrae
    of a crossbow arrow

    two shadows in the tower
    turn hooves to bone

    out on bosworth field richard
    demonstrates the archer’s paradox

    there is no scientific record
    of this parthian shot
    no equine remains

    today under the curvature
    of a leicester carpark

    richard’s ribcage rides the symmetry
    of an english war horse

Kerrin P. Sharpe’s first collection Three Day in a Wishing Well was published by Victoria University Press in 2012. Recently a selection of her poetry appeared in Oxford Poets 13 by Carcanet Press and also in Blackbox Manifold. She is also well represented in various other publications including Best New Zealand Poems.

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Stephen Claughton: Brass-rubbing

    Rather than raise from the tomb
    some long-dead knight or his lady,
    I practised at home
    with our northern, vernacular brass.

    I’d slot a pre-decimal penny
    under a quarto sheet,
    then take a pencil to shade it
    and hatch the image out.

    Like a photo, the print developed
    in front of my eyes,
    heads a monarch, tails Britannia.
    Not ones for the album, these:

    the activity was the point,
    the fact all you needed to do
    was scribble across the page,
    while the picture drew itself.

    Over and over again,
    the magic worked every time,
    as if by rubbing coins
    I’d revealed a hidden talent.
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Stephen Claughton: An Ice-age Flute

    It’s the wing bone of a vulture,
    marked off, notched and drilled
    to make it into a flute.
    What looks merely improvised
    was precisely crafted, we’re told,
    the finger-holes carefully spaced
    on the pentatonic scale.

    Forty millennia back,
    someone from proto-Ulm
    fashioned this instrument
    to play Palaeolithic tunes;
    somebody broke it too.

    The music it made is lost
    like the meaning of
    the amulets they carved
    and the animals they drew,
    before hunting them to extinction
    over the mammoth steppe.

    Now it’s mounted behind glass
    as if entombed in ice.
    My hands itch to feel the holes
    indented in the shaft
    like those on a whistle I played.
    It’s in our DNA;
    I’m sure I could bring it to life.

Stephen Claughton read English at Oxford and worked for 34 years as a civil servant in London. His poems have appeared or are forthcoming in The Interpreter’s House, Iota, Other Poetry and The Warwick Review. He has twice been nominated for the Forward Best Single Poem Prize.

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Martyn Crucefix: House sold

    We tramp up the garden
    over sodden slippy grass
    to three silver birches that mark the boundary

    and someone might see us
    bringing fork and spade
    and this black bin liner to the foot of the trees

    where we eye mossy cushions
    and gravitate to this
    barely visible mound where you point and speak—

    somebody might see us
    as I slice open the earth
    complicated by roots but in this precise spot

    the spade slides in well
    as if re-opening a hole
    and someone might watch as you crouch and scrape

    your fingers stained dark
    as you rake the soil
    and I thrust in the fork—someone might catch us

    now both on our knees
    like archaeologists
    unearthing an object the size of a sweet jar

    but maroon in colour
    and punctured by my fork
    and you take it and wrap in the black bin liner

    then stand to wait
    as I shovel the soil
    into the scar of the hole that moss will soon cover—

    and somebody might gaze
    on our little cortege
    headed back to the house your mother warmed

    and dressed all those years
    now she’s a little mixed
    with its beloved soil and each step confirms

    possession is temporary
    even a place of rest
    you wait beside the car you begin to let go

Martyn Crucefix’s most recent collection, Hurt, was published by Enitharmon. His translation of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Duino Elegies (Enitharmon 2006) was shortlisted for the 2007 Popescu Prize for European Poetry Translation. His translation of Rilke’s Sonnets to Orpheus was published in 2012.

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Sue Rose: Memorial

    I will not care about the firing,
    the mastery of materials, when I’m grit
    and grilled bone, a snow of particles
    in a ceramic body, each pot
    perched like a squat bird on the rungs
    of a white ladder, a spreading estate.
    Mourning is the stuff of their making—
    they were born to hold death.

    The vessel for my remains
    will be those who carry part of me
    in their histories. They will scatter
    the ash of my absence over their hearts
    as the world dies and hear me ticking
    in their veins. They will be my memorial.

Sue Rose is a literary translator working on a children’s fantasy series billed as the French Harry Potter. Her debut collection, From the Dark Room, was published by Cinnamon (2011). A chapbook, Heart Archives, is due out from Hercules Editions in late 2013 and a second collection, The Cost of Keys, will be published in November 2014.

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Carol DeVaughn: Cup and Saucer

    It’s because the cup
    was made for the saucer
    that the move for both
    from the hermetic cupboard
    to the gregarious flowerbed
    is a viable option
    even in a walled garden
    filled with broken china
    long since buried.
    The possibility of resurrection
    remains open to the sky
    and to the obliging earth giving way
    to the loving molecules of sun
    and rain and their progeny.

Carol DeVaughn, American-born, has been living and working in London since 1970. Retired from full-time teaching, she is now preparing her first full collection. Her poems have appeared in magazines and anthologies and she has won several prizes, including a Bridport in 2012.

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Stephen Oliver: Comb

    The razed city with its grids, blocks,
    rectangles, edges worn as molars, as if to
    say, ‘I am archaeology, seek me
    out millennia hence; I am no longer a city
    in a hurry—I am privation.

                                                  My bronze gates
    torn from city walls; all the hubbub
    of the market place you will find here—come
    sift through my ashes, you will discover
    a brooch celebrating the joy & sorrow of one life.
    Here you will find some turquoise comb,
    that knew the tresses of a maiden from this
    portico, overlooking an enclosed
    garden, her hair red-gold as those helmets
    that entered the orchard, and found
    her felled there, under the sun’s blade.’

Stephen Oliver is the author of 17 volumes of poetry. He has travelled extensively and signed on with the radio ship The Voice of Peace broadcasting in the Mediterranean out of Jaffa, Israel. He has free-lanced in Australia/New Zealand as a newsreader, radio producer, columnist, and much else. He has lived in Australia for the last two decades but is now spending an extended sojourn in NewZealand. His new volume, Intercolonial a long narrative poem published by John Denny of Puriri Press, dennyjhs@xtra.co.nz (2013) is as much about Australia as it is New Zealand.

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Merryn Williams: Isaac

    I cannot find him on the 1901 census.

    More than one Isaac Rosenberg is there.
    And all are dead, and all but him forgotten.
    I can’t retrieve their stories, knowing only
    that they’re reduced to dust, or the odd fragment
    of bone, in English cemeteries, filth of France.

    If I am to get inside his head, it’s useless
    to go round the tower blocks in modern Whitechapel
    High Street. There’s a plaque for him, but he’d be baffled.
    Go instead into the labyrinth of your own head
    and hear the dark doors quietly close behind you.

    Isaac in khaki, with his brother,
    stares out of the ancient photograph
    taken at the especial request of their mother,
    who tried hard enough, God knows, to keep them out of it.

    Isaac, who wasn’t happy about killing,
    but, none the less, consented to become a war poet,
    immersed himself in that new and strange phenomenon
    and knew it was driving him mad, and his time was limited.

    Returning, he heard the larks,
    and, less poetically, lice feasted on
    the soft flesh under his battledress.
    He wrote about both experiences
    before Abraham killed him.

Merryn Williams is a committee member of the Wilfred Owen Association, now preparing for the centenary of World War 1. She is the author of Wilfred Owen (Seren) and editor of The Georgians 1900-31 (Shoestring) and In the Spirit of Wilfred Owen (Wilfred Owen Association).

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Sarah Glaz: Mathematical Modelling

    Mathematical modelling may be viewed
    As an organizing principle
    That enables us to handle
    A vast array of information

    As an organizing principle
    We could use the color spectrum
    A vast array of information
    Would become a rainbow in the sky

    We could use the color spectrum
    And the scaling notes spanning an octave
    Would become a rainbow in the sky
    Shining through the melody of rain

    And the scaling notes spanning an octave
    And letters gleaned from ancient alphabets
    Shining through the melody of rain
    Nature translated into words

    And letters gleaned from ancient alphabets
    That enable us to handle
    Nature translated into words
    May be viewed as mathematical modelling

Sarah Glaz’s poetry has appeared in Ibis Review, Convergence, The Mathematical Monthly, The Ghazal Page, Recursive Angel, The Humanistic Mathematics Journal, Talking Writing and other periodicals. She is professor of mathematics at the University of Connecticut, and serves as associate editor for Journal of Mathematics and the Arts.

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Brian Docherty: Arrangements

    Uncle Donald made punctuality an art form.
    He never turned up at the theatre late,
    was never refused his seat in a concert
    because the pianist had sat down on time,
    never turned up at the airport four hours
    early, and then missed the plane because
    the clock in the bar had deceived him.

    He kept a fob watch in his waistcoat pocket,
    a wristwatch, a weather eye on shop clocks,
    public clocks, and the local park’s floral clock.
    When he was given a mobile phone for Xmas,
    he was delighted to find it too told the time,
    but kept his other watches wound up & handy.

    Like everything else in his life, his funeral
    was a masterpiece of planning & timing.
    He allowed for delays in setting off,
    traffic jams, road works, breakdowns,
    civil war, and riot; three of his options,
    then a Special Branch operation in Wood Green,
    happened on his way to the crematorium.

    He assumed that other people, their relatives,
    the undertakers, the vicar, priest or rabbi
    seeing them off, would take similar care
    with their arrangements; circumstances
    even he couldn’t foresee - as his sister put it
    over sherry & sandwiches - conspired to ensure
    his service was carried out while he was stuck
    on the North Circular. His coffin shouldered
    its way into the next slot on the conveyer belt,
    and Uncle Donald shared a Humanist funeral.

Brian Docherty lives in north London, member of Word for Word Writers Group. He has 3 books; Armchair Theatre (Hearing Eye, 1999); Desk with a View (Hearing Eye, 2008); Woke up this Morning (Smokestack Books, 2012).

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Tatiana Bonch-Osmolovskaya: Loitering around

    finally to loiter aimlessly –
    as was written in an old book, do you remember? –
    a private airplane flew
    from point A to point B.
    A steamer went down the river, with a VIP passenger on board,
    and his long-awaited guest.

    Smoke belches from the chimney, a siren buzzes.
    Two decks, a wheel house, passenger seats and cabins.
    The steamer moves with a constant velocity
    down the river for seven days
    and seven hours to its destination.
    In point A, as well as in point B
    waiting for them are families, work, police, justice…

    The captain is a passenger’s friend and possibly under his command.
    He comes down for dinner wearing full uniform
    raises a glass of champagne to his guests;
    the pilot, of course, is not here for their dinner
    but a flight attendant brings them champagne.

    In three days and a half hour
    half way from point A to point B
    the passenger puts a gun to the captain’s head
    demanding to turn back to point A.
    The captain smiles to him
    and gives orders.

    After three and a half days, four hours –
    find the velocity of the river or air’s flow –
    they see from their ship on the soil of point A
    police ambulance firefighters journalists…

    – What do we do? the captain asks.
    – Turn, the passenger orders.
    From point A there was fired a torpedo.
    – Course to point B! the captain swears
    despite the presence of a lady.

    – We, the passenger says –
    until they drop a depth charge on us
    until they totally get us –
    we will wander around there and back
    measuring depth
    under the keel of the plane, the fin of the ship
    studying velocity of flow.

Tatiana Bonch-Osmolovskaya was born in Simferopol, Crimea, former USSR. She is a graduate of the Moscow Institute for Physics and Technology and the Moscow State Humanitarian University. In 2011 she received a Doctoral degree of the University of New South Wales, for a dissertation on contemporary Russian experimental poetry. She has seven published books of prose, poetry and translations. As an artist she has participated in a number of exhibitions on arts and sciences, including Bridges conferences in 2012 and 2013.

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Graham Burchell: Christmas On The Hudson

translated from ‘Navidad en el Hudson’ by F.G. Lorca

    That grey sponge!
    That sailor with his throat recently cut.
    That great river.
    That breeze of dark limits.
    That edge, love, that edge.
    Four sailors were struggling with the world,
    with the world of edges that all eyes see,
    the world you cannot cross without horses.
    They were one, a hundred, a thousand sailors
    struggling with the high-speed world
    unaware that the world
    was alone in the sky.

    The world alone in the lonely sky.
    These are the hills of hammers and the triumph of thick grass.
    These are swarming anthills and coins in mud.
    The world alone in the lonely sky
    and the air at the exits of all the suburbs.

    The worm sang of the terror of the wheel
    and the slashed sailor
    sang to the bear of water that would hug his body
    and all sang alleluia,
    alleluia. Desert Sky.
    It's the same, the same! Alleluia.

    I spent all night on the scaffolding of the suburbs
    leaving my blood on the bones of the projects,
    helping to gather the sailor’s torn sails,
    and I am empty-handed in the murmur of the river’s mouth .
    It doesn’t matter that every minute
    a new child shakes his sprigs of veins
    or that the newborn Viper, let loose under the branches,
    calms the bloodlust of voyeurs
    What matters is this : void. The world alone. The river’s mouth.
    Not dawn. Inert fable.
    Only this: the river’s mouth.
    Oh my grey sponge!
    Oh my neck recently ripped!
    Oh my great river!
    Oh my breeze of limits that are not mine!
    Oh edge of my love! Oh wounding edge!

Graham Burchell was born in Canterbury and now lives in Dawlish, Devon. He has lived in a host of places in between including Zambia, Saudi Arabia, Tenerife, Mexico, France, Chile and the USA. He has an M.A. in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. His latest collection The Chongololo Club was published by Pindrop Press in 2012. He has won, been placed or short-listed in a number of competitions, and has been published in many magazines. He was the 2012 Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year

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Nancy Mattson: Widow, Marooned

    I woke this morning stretching, drew the sun-bleached
    curtains that had covered up the sky, rubbed my eyes:
    there was no prairie where the prairie used to stretch
    beyond the fences that enclosed our herds of cattle
    when we branded them, releasing them to graze
    unplanted grasses all the hot dry summer long.

    Where has the prairie gone?

    Our dependable creek is drowned in a lake, no
    it’s a sea that came from nowhere overnight:
    never in any memory of mine
    or any prairie tales our elders told
    has water ever spread around this house
    marooning anyone. The power’s out

    but the radio tells me all the rivers
    from the Rockies to my heart, I mean
    the heart of this continent, have overrun
    my eyes, I mean their banks, and flooded plains
    that floods have never covered over until now.

    Some unknown fury’s sucking up the oceans
    turning cheek against prevailing westerlies
    and filling up the devil’s cunning funnels
    as he laughs and pours out
    forty days and nights of rain
    in a single day and night.

    Why is that helicopter circling my roof?

    Oh give me back the drought I want
    a multitude of desiccating angels
    to swoop down from the mountains
    on a herd of shiny hoovers
    to suck the prairies empty I am thirsty
    for the dustbowl of my youth.

Nancy Mattson moved from the Canadian prairies to London in 1990. She has published three full-length poetry collections, most recently Finns and Amazons (Arrowhead Press, 2012). This poem began in Kate Foley’s workshop in Wivenhoe, Essex, just after the unusual Alberta floods in June 2013

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John Snelling: Drought

    Eight months – no rain.
    Earth cracked, streams dry,
    baked mud where rivers were.
    The sun-bleached land
    is desiccated, dying.
    Sky, blue and cloudless,
    nothing disturbs the dust.
    Nowhere for us.

    A tear falls.
    It is not enough.

John Snelling has been writing poetry since the 1960s. In 1976, he won first prize in the City of Westminster Arts Council’s poetry competition. After this, success in competitions eluded him until, in 2013, he gained a Judge’s Special Commendation in The Poetry Box competition for dark and horror poetry.

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Vaughan Rapatahana: canine rain

    the rain
          struts past
    my window
    like a petulant dog.

    shakes itself ragged
    while       pissing on
    the  spindly  plants
    hiding on the ledge.

    it reeks
    of rotten meat
    putrefying
    after   s o m e  errant
    down
        pour

       &
    there are other ineluctable
    stray aromas
    malingering on its breath,
    residue of a previous
                      scurry.

    when I pussyfoot outside
    it’s lurking still,
    fangs slobbering behind
    nimbus snout;
    ready to snap
    any incursion;

    rabid
    eyes a tempest
    squalling for a fight.

Vaughan Rapatahana is a Kiwi (Te Atiawa is his iwi or tribe) who is a long-term resident of Hong Kong, with a home also in Pampanga, Philippines. He is published widely in a variety of genre.

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Kate Foley: Going Home

    Faces in the tram, wearing a used up
    five o’clock pallor, fidgeting the beads
    of their journey further on its string.

    Doors hiss sideways. A hint
    of chill canal water, rain,

    then thick as garbage soup, a smell
    that suddenly tips tired faces backward,
    like the rapid ring of water round a flung pebble.

    Stronger. Yellower. Closer.
    He’s leaning on my pole, this stranger,
    who’s peed his pants with liver salts, booze
    and lye, his face a broken collection
    of darkened parts.

    Quickly I duck under his rancid armpit,
    - please don’t let him speak! – though he’s trapped
    in my nose hairs,
    on the skin of my soul, where a little blood marks
    our connective tissue tearing away
    too fast.
    .

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Kate Foley: A Dead language

(Alice Guerrero, the last northern Pomo speaker, died aged 90)

    Walking in an aftermath of trees,
    through concrete, bright as lilac
    but smelling of baked mineral,
    remembering, yesterday was the last
    day somebody spoke in Pomo.

    But perhaps water in Pomo,
    or hold my hand
    or even let me go
    was too hard for the nurses;
    maybe she used English.

    Water, meaning little stream,
    bright as a deer's eye,
    is not the same as English water
    from the tap,
    and hold my hand,
    if it means give me the courage
    of my tribulations for the journey
    is simply the clothing of a deep look.

    Let me go —
    this to her ancestors,
    waiting to bury
    their exiled syllables
    with the significant weight
    of her speech.

Kate Foley’s 5th full collection One Window North was published by Shoestring Press in 2012. She lives, writes and leads workshops between Amsterdam and Suffolk.

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Martin Burke: A Shadowed Cadence

    Where the sea comes in
    Where the land waits and welcomes it
    Where a young girl does cartwheels and cat’s tumble

    What is the future but this moment continued?
    What is the horizon but a shifting fiction?
    What is a fiction’s worth?

    And the tide comes and goes and the cartwheels go on
    As if innocence holds a place in the world
    That cannot be easily displaced.
                                     *
    All day his shadow upon me and words with his cadence
    As if there was no other to be spoken
    But there is

    The snail’s silver path across the wall
    The garden tidy and close cropped like a shield-wall
    The door leading into the garden beyond

    Beyond – old words rattle in my head
    But are accurate to the moment as are
    The window-boxes of geraniums

    The cat stretches lazily beneath
                               *
    But nothing exempts me from duty
    Not the cool of morning in which I sit outdoors
    Nor the temptation to sit and do nothing

    Nothing exempts – not the fibres burrowing in my bones
    Nor the difficulty of a beginning or the persistence needed
    When the line won’t yield up what it knows

    And displacement comes in an off-hand remark
    And I’m back at the beach
    Where she cartwheels towards the water-line

    Unhindered by the fictions or the facts.
                                   *
    What shifts?
    What holds?
    What does both to its own advantage?

    Waterline
    Shifting and holding
    Bettering me to face the facts and fictions of the day.

Martin Burke is an Irish born poet & playwright living in Belgium from where he has published sixteen books of his work in the UK, USA, Ireland, and Belgium

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Robert Nisbet: Circles

    Cloud
                                             Dissipating

    as the beach’s sand and shingle are lit
    by the rays of an afternoon sun.

    The girl, her shoulders turned slightly in on herself,
    walks slowly to the shore. She might almost be keening.

    Then the lurcher, a golden brindled animal
    brought down to the beach by an older woman,
    first on the lead then loosed,
    describes around them
    its wild wide circles,
    whole furlongs of brown sand,
    racing, dancing.

    An hour’s gone before the woman clips it back on lead,
    and the girl, her shoulders lifted a little now, walks
    more briskly, stopping once to pocket a pebble or a shell,
    back up the shingle, to the car park and the village.

Robert Nisbet has had just over 100 short stories published, most recently in his collection Downtrain (Parthian, 2004), with work featured in a forthcoming Library of Wales anthology of the Welsh short story 1900-2010. He also has nearly 100 poems published, with some of them in his pamphlet Merlin’s Lane (Prolebooks, 2011)

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Fiona Sinclair: Curiosity

    Driven by the Iago voice in your head
    you let yourself into his Google account
    rifle through inbox, trash, spam…
    until you find an email that scorches your fingers.

    Brandishing his billet doux like lipstick on a collar,
    your  “Can’t you see how I feel?”
    is met with a bewildered child’s gaze
    “But the words mean nothing”.
    So he talks you round with “the only woman for me”…
    but his good night email becomes “Blah, blah, blah”
    that is skim-read then trashed.

    Compelled by friends choric  “But he lied”
    you unlock his phone with fumbling fingers.
    One contact blazes like a red neon sign
    pointing to a website that punches you in the face.

    You send his belongings packing to the shed,
    but his email, “everyone’s got a past”
    gets his foot back in the door of your life.
    Still, watching TV, teaching grammar, buying clothes,
    you self- harm by envisaging:
    his Vauxhall joining other cars in a dark lay-by;
    NSA stilettos tripping up to his flat;
    him meeting a broadminded couple for coffee….

Fiona Sinclair is an ex-English teacher. Her third collection Wonderland was published by Indigo Dreams Press in May 2013. She is the editor of the on-line poetry magazine Message in a Bottle .

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David Flynn: Blur

    I was walking down the amusement street.
    Night, neon red yellow white flash stripes.
    When she. Thousands moved, but she.
    Stood upright. Blur short red-head.
    So I walked up to her and said.
    Then she said. Cold arctic wastes
    blowing snow over an ice plain.
    But I invited. And much to my surprise.
    She blurred with me.

    To the bar. To the booth.
    Where she placed her purse beside her.
    Trim little body. Aging face high cheek bones.
    Indian? French? Red tousled short hair.
    Dyed? Fading. So,
    she said.
    My name is, I said. My name is, she said.
    Who are you? I will start. Because
    to know a woman takes a million years
    of talk that is not directly on what
    she is but that stays outside her skin
    and gradually. Gradually. Sinks within.
    Who are you? she asked. I am a man.

    Rifle type.

    Language legs crossed.
    Red wine red.
    I have to go, she said. Reaching
    inside. Her purse.
    Here
    is my business card.

    I was interested.

    Couldn't be eager. No one is eager.
    Couldn't wait. No one waits.
    Friday night. Because.
    Saturday was TOO important.

    Broke up. Back.
    Broke up. Back.
    Blur.

David Flynn’s jobs have included newspaper reporter, magazine editor, and teacher. His literary publications total more than 130 worldwide. He is married and has one daughter

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Rowland Bagnall: Wittgenstein

    I find teaching in a school
    Distasteful, where the minds
    Are all so hopeless. Please, burn
    My work and notebooks
    And give my greetings to
    Your little boy; I have not
    Heard anything new
    For a very long time,
    And I have not been
    Sounding like myself.

    Yours, Wittgenstein.

Rowland Bagnall is a 21 year old student of English Literature. He is the third of five children. His work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in The Lake, The English Chicago Review, Miracle, and Message in a Bottle

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Gordon Meade: Moth

    Moth loves flame but knows
    she cannot fly too close to it.

    Moth also likes expensive clothes
    but knows the only way she is going
    to own a fur coat is by taking

    chunks out of it with her mouth.
    Moth doesn't mind being the black sheep
    of the family. Let Butterfly get

    all the plaudits. Moth has always
    known she is the more mysterious.
    .

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Gordon Meade: Salmon

    Salmon knows all that is
    entailed in going home. He knows
    how hard the journey can be;
    how many leaps and bumps
    there are along the way.

    Salmon also knows what it is
    that awaits him on his return. At the end,
    no bunting, no marching band,
    just a slow, lingering death; just that
    and the procreation of the species.

Gordon Meade is a Scottish poet now living in London. His seventh collection of poems, Sounds of the Real World, was published in September 2013 by Cultured Llama Publishing.

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Alan Price: Their Words Are Here For You To Take

    Mournful tone of a trumpet. Jewelled phrasing of piano.
    Purple brown smoke miles away from duet.
    Clouds regrouping into more smoked clouds.
    Pretending to be ominous, as they pattern like a tornado.
    Tiny insect police helicopter flying into a clearing.
    Lights come on. Deflecting all these sunset entered rooms.
    Houses, flats, hotels prepare themselves for evening.
    Traffic begins to flow quicker. A road tinted by destinations.
    Trumpet binds piano to ruminate downwards into night.
    This twilight of droning music and passing moments.
    A playful sense of a day’s completeness.
    I could die, just now. Fulfilled. Content.
    Who else can ever receive this properly?
    Really see or hear what these things couldn’t express?
    Their words are here for you to take.

Alan Price is a North London based poet. His work has appeared in many magazines. A debut poetry collection Outfoxing Hyenas was published by Indigo Dreams in 2012.

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Michael Bartholomew-Biggs: Famous last sounds

“A Constable Calls” by Seamus Heaney 1939-2013

    His clock's stopped.  Ours still
    stalk us with their tick, tick, tick -
    like policemen's bikes.
    .
    .

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By Michael Bartholomew-Biggs • new poetry, poetry, Year 2013